The Voice That Thunders, page 19
Neolithic flints have been found on Alderley Edge, but no securely Bronze Age artefacts. In 1991 a Middle Bronze Age palstave was found in a garden in the area known as the Hough below the north side of the Edge; at the same time Alan Garner rediscovered another palstave that had been found in 1936 at Common Carr Farm, on the plain a mile and a half to the northwest of the mines. Both find spots suggest these bronzes may have been deposited as offerings in springs or pools, and they need have no direct connection with the industrial activity above.
The mines themselves have been extensively worked in the post-medieval period, from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries and, particularly in recent years, have attracted a great number of visitors and not a few vandals, so that the chances of finding evidence for early mining around the shafts are slim. Not surprising perhaps, that the Manchester Museum, as well as a large collection of stone hammers from Alderley Edge, possesses an object labelled rather confusedly as a “Stone Age iron pick” (in fact identified as Roman in 1905 by its finders, Roeder and Graves, and most probably from a nineteenth-century drill bit).
In 1979 a team from the Manchester Museum, funded by the Manpower Services Commission, carried out a new survey of the Edge, complementary to the cataloguing of the Museum’s prehistoric collections, but the plan to section one of the “ancient” working hollows in order to retrieve samples for carbon-dating came to nothing for lack of funding and because of a change of direction by the MSC. In 1991 David Gale conducted exploratory excavations for Bradford University in two areas of the Edge, partly with a similar aim in view, but none of the organic material found was suitable as dating evidence.
There remains the mysterious shovel, found the year after Boyd Dawkins’ excavations and dismissed by Warrington as “of no significance for independent dating”. Indeed, he pointed out that wooden shovels were in use in the ore treatment works at Alderley at the time of its discovery.
As some miners were at work on the Edge, they came upon a large collection of stone implements, consisting of celts or adzes, hammerheads or axes, mauls, etc. from one to two feet below the surface . . . and others were left in some old diggings of the copper ore, from three to four yards in depth, along with an oak shovel that had been very roughly used.
So Dr Sainter in 1878, repeated by Roeder in the Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society for 1901; and (with the last illustration I have seen of the shovel) by William Shone in Prehistoric Man in Cheshire (1911). Since then it had vanished. It seemed to have become another of the legends of Alderley Edge. “If only I could find out what had happened to that shovel,” remarked David Gale, in wistful ignorance, as we rattled in an elderly train out to his first meeting with Alan Garner.
There are few moments in any museum curator’s life when he does not really believe he is seeing what is laid before him. One’s colleagues, more senescent, more cynical or just less gullible, tended not to believe it. Not, perhaps, a Tudor winnowing-fan, but very probably a peat-cutter’s spade, no older than medieval, they said. No one argued with the circumstances of the discovery, but the fact remained that the dating of evidence for that context, the stone hammers, were themselves not properly dated. The donor bravely agreed to our seeking a radiocarbon date for the shovel, and with the collaboration of Velson Horie, Keeper of Conservation at the Manchester Museum, we submitted an application to the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the Research Laboratory in Oxford.
The rest is science. Although such shovels have been found in other “primitive” mining contexts, what is exciting for the archaeologist is not only that this one (an object of great interest in its own right because of its exceptional condition and unusual history) thus belongs to the Middle Bronze Age, but also that activity in the mines themselves can now be firmly dated at least to the Middle Bronze Age, and probably to the early part of that period. To judge by the great quantities and variety of the stone hammers that have been found, that Bronze Age activity must have been considerable.
Legends have a way of leading to the truth.
* * *
Act III: The Scientist’s Story.
RUPERT HOUSELEY, Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology
In September 1992 John Prag and Velson Horie approached me about the possibility of getting a radiocarbon date on a wooden shovel which had been donated to the Manchester Museum. On hearing about the Alderley Edge spade the thought crossed my mind “wooden objects seem to be in fashion” since only a few months before, I and my colleagues at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit had been involved in dating a series of wooden objects: a wheel, longbow, a yoke and some bowls, from the collections of the National Museums of Scotland. When John Prag sent me a photograph of the object, I was struck by how similar it was to the peat-diggers’ spades I had seen in old pictures from the Somerset Levels. As to its age, who (or what) could tell?
The answer was to “what” rather than “who”, and it lay in the wood from which the shovel had been made. As all users of radiocarbon dating will know, the possibility comes from the fact that a living tree takes up 14C from the atmosphere and incorporates it into its growth rings. The atoms of 14C decay with time and from this we tell the age. By determining the date of the wood one arrives at an approximate value for the time of manufacture of the shovel, although, strictly speaking, the wood could have been worked into the form of a shovel any time afterwards.
Late in 1992, once we had heard that the dating would be supported under the programme funded by the Science and Engineering Research Council, the next set of things to do was to think about how much wood to take, from where it would be taken, and to decide whether there was any sign of past treatment by preservatives.
As Alan Garner has shown, although the “recent” history of the shovel was known, or could in part be inferred, what the original Victorian miners may have done to the shovel was not known, and so we had to assume a “preservative” may have been applied to prevent its disintegrating. It was partly to minimise potential problems from this that Velson Horie drilled into the shovel, discarding the outer discoloured surface, to collect one hundred milligrams. ( of a gram) of clean “saw-dust”. This proved more than enough for a date.
A reflux wash with organic solvents was added to cope with any residual amounts of potential preservative. This rounded off the process: the result is chemistry and physics.
The resultant date 3470 + – 90 BP (OxA-4050) puts the age of the wood firmly in the first half of the second millennium BC, the shovel into the Middle Bronze Age, and, by implication, the mining of copper back into the prehistoric past. All because of a chain of some rather improbable events.
Calibration diagram for the radiocarbon date for the wooden shovel. The radiocarbon date of 3470 Before Present (left of diagram) calibrates to a date centring on 1750 BC (time below the diagram)
* * *
1 This article, by Alan Garner, John Prag and Robert Houseley, was first published in Current Archaeology Number 137, March 1994. (For availability contact 9 Nassington Road, London NW3 2TX.)
14
The Beauty Things
HIGH IN THE skies above Belorus, a man was plunging to earth. He saw another man soaring up towards him at the same speed. As they passed each other, the man who was rising shouted, “Good morning, Comrade! What is your job?”
“Good morning to you, Comrade!” said the man who was falling. “I design parachutes. And what job is yours?”
“I am a bomb disposal expert,” said the other.1
That story was told to me by a Russian Professor of Folklore in Moscow in 1986. His special area of research was the xenophobic joke, and he said that every country in Europe had an area that was, by tradition, populated by the inept and/or irrational: a Place of Fools. He told me that, historically, every Slav considered the Slav to the west of him to be inferior, and he had developed a thesis, which I would not like to have to subject to rigorous scrutiny, that the Place of Fools always lay to the west.
“And that,” he said, “is why the English have Irish Jokes.” He went on to explain that the cause of there being a Place of Fools was xenophobia, in its original exact meaning of “fear of the stranger”, rather than in its more modern use as “dislike of the stranger”.
It was an interesting conversation, but I did not have the knowledge to test it for flaws. However, it did set me thinking about the relationship between Wales and its marcher counties, especially my native Cheshire. I realised that, although I had been brought up to have strong opinions about the Welsh, I knew of no Welsh Jokes. The antipathy was more the paranoia of neighbours than a xenophobia. One example will show the difference. My mother drilled into me from earliest childhood that the Welsh were not to be trusted, nor was I ever to have anything to do with a Welsh girl, because “their eyes are too close together”. That was a serious warning, not a joke.
I plundered my mind for a Welsh Joke, yet could find none. The nearest I came was in an anecdote about Welshness, told by the late Lord Elwyn Jones, so there can be no charge of racism laid against the story. It is, no doubt, apocryphal, but no less true for that.
Lord Elwyn was driving his car across mid-Wales. He was high in the mountains, in cloud, and thoroughly lost. He saw a small, old man, cap on head, sack on shoulders. He stopped the car, and said, “Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?” The old man looked him slowly up and down, down and up, and replied, “You are in a car.”
Elwyn Jones said, afterwards, that here was the perfect answer to a Parliamentary Question. It is concise. It is accurate. It tells you nothing that you want to know.
More to my point, it certainly was not Irish, in the English, idiomatic, pejorative use of the word. It reminded me more of my father, who was a quiet, gently spoken, kind man, of little formal education and few words. He was a painter and decorator, and I remembered being with him one day as he was up a ladder, painting a house on an isolated road. An open-topped sports car pulled up. In it were two parodies of the chinless wonder English middle class, each wearing his stitched-peak brown cap. The driver started badly with, “I say, my man!” My father rested his brush. “Which is the way to Prestbury?”
“What end do you want?” said my father.
“What end?” said the driver. “Prestbury!”
“Oh, come on,” said the passenger. “The man’s a fool.” With the timing of a professional, in the silence before the exhaust roared, my father said, “I may be a fool. But I’m not lost.”
The old Welshman and my father could have spoken each other’s lines. But my father was not Welsh. Was he?
I thought further. Yes. Without “The Troubles”, we were queasy about the Irish, in an amorphous way. And there was antagonism, but not fear, with regard to the Welsh. But, cry you mercy, we did not have to go to Wales to find antagonism. My own village was perpetually at war with the next one, two miles away: so much so, that the natives never refer to the places by their map names of “Alderley” and “Wilmslow”, but as Sodom and Gomorrah. And to go to the hilltop settlement of Mow Cop was to risk grievous bodily harm. On Mow Cop, in my parents’ youth, the natural reaction to a stranger was to beat him up on sight and to wrap his bicycle around his neck.
I have met only one instance of genuine Anglo-Welsh antagonism, and here both sides were provocative. My secondary education uncovered in me a linguistic ability above the norm. I appeared to soak up languages without effort, and I became a Classicist. In my last year at school, we went for a day trip to Tomen-y-Mur. The weather was hot. Before setting off back to Manchester in the coach, we stopped at Pentrefoelas for sustenance. There were about twelve of us, and our form master.
As we entered the shop, we interrupted an animated conversation that was being conducted in English, but, at the moment the Saxons appeared, everybody switched to Welsh. It was all a bit pointed. We stood there, feeling foolish; then our form master turned to us and asked us, in Greek, what we wanted to buy. So, possibly for the first time in Wales, a shopping list was drawn up in Attic Greek, and total silence from the other customers. Then, insult to injury, the list completed, our form master conveyed the requirements to the shopkeeper in fluent Welsh. It is a matter of record that we, and the coach, left Pentrefoelas unscathed.
However, all the way home, my head was filled with those few seconds of music I had heard in the shop. And, when I got home, I annoyed my parents by using every spare moment I could to find a wavelength on the ancient radio that, through the crackling, would let me hear Welsh. It was a change from Geraldo and from Forces’ Favourites that was not appreciated.
I felt that I understood this language without knowing what it was saying. I could not learn, for lack of facilities, but the sensation was one more of remembering. It was as if I were hearing the knights, who lay in the cave with their king under the hill behind our house, talking in their sleep.
When, three years later, I began to write my first book, which is about that hill and those knights, I knew that the personal names of my other-worldly characters could not be synthetic and had to pre-date the English. So I came upon Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales, and on something called The Mabinogion. And I was angry.
Why had I been filled with so many alien tongues and made especially proficient in Latin and Greek, whose sounds were wondrous, but whose tales were, for me, then, as bloodless and as cold as their marble? Why had I been kept from a language that not only sounded to be “mine”, but also told its stories as I dreamed my dreams? I read that the material was obscure. But, even in translation, it was not obscure to me. Why should something be called “obscure” because it spoke fact as poetry, history as legend, sound as sense? The boon list in “Culhwch ac Olwen” changed me for ever in my heart. When I read Preiddeu Annwfn (The Spoils of the Otherworld), the hairs of my neck rose, as they do to this day.
Complete was the grave of Gwair in Caer Sidi,
In the tale of Pwyll and Pryderi.
No one before him went into it.
A heavy blue chain held the faithful youth,
And before the Spoils of Annwfn gloriously he sings,
And for ever the song shall last.
Three times the fullness of Prydwen we went into it.
Except seven, none came from Caer Sidi.
Am I not worth the fame to be heard in song?
In Caer Pedryvan, four times turning;
The first word from the cauldron, when was it spoken?
Is it not the cauldron of the Chieftain of Annwfn?
What does it mean to do?
It will not boil the food of a coward.
A flashing bright sword to him was raised
And left in the hand of Lleminawg.
And before the gate of the Cold Place
The horns of light shall be burning.
And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labour,
Except seven, none came back from Caer Vedwyd.
Am I not worth the fame to be heard in song?
In the four-cornered castle, in the island of the strong door,
Where twilight and the black night move together
Bright wine was the offer of the host.
Three times the fulness of Prydwen we went on sea.
Except seven, none came out of Caer Rigor.
I will not let praise to the lords of letters.
Beyond Caer Wydyr they saw not the might of Arthur.
Sixty hundred men stood on the wall.
It was hard to speak to their sentinel.
Three shiploads of Prydwen there went with Arthur,
Except seven, none came from Caer Golud.
I shall not give place to those with trailing shields.
They know not on what day that Chieftain arose.
They know not on what day, or what was the cause of it,
Or on what hour of the splendid day that Cwy was born,
Who caused that he should not go to the Dales of Devwy.
They know not the brindled ox, thick his head-band.
Seven score knobs in his collar.
And when we went with Arthur of anxious memory,
Except seven, none came out of Caer Vandwy . . .
Here was a multi-level logic that gave me no problem. Here was a language that spoke straight. How could some Welsh scholars complain, for instance, of The Third Branch of The Mabinogion, that it is “a medley of themes that are hard to disentangle”, or that to compose The Mabinogion could be likened to trying to create art from a demolition site? The answer was obvious, to me. In order to understand The Mabinogion, especially “The Four Branches”, and “Culhwch ac Olwen”, it was necessary to have the ear of a poet as well as the intellect of a scholar, and to realise that this tongue called Welsh held sound to be as important as sense.
The Mabinogion, at first glance, is a rag-bag of Celtic genius, made of fragments of tales that have cohered as, through the millennia, they have rolled across lands and languages from their Indo-European source, to end up as a tangle of seeming flotsam and jetsam of story upon the Atlantic coast. Though unmistakably Celtic in form and content, which explains the repetitive onomastic elements in the stories, which the Celt uses as tent pegs to pin them down firmly and finally, against being blown out to sea, time and time again, elements of the Mahabharata and the Rig Veda show through.
The result is a masterpiece, mesmeric in its cultural imagination, its gods euhemerised, yet, since it is composed of archetype and metaphor, it is universal and timeless. Where some may see the rubble of a demolition site, I see the perfection of a beaver’s dam: heterogeneous in detail, yet whole.
So I wrote my first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, prefacing it with the Legend of Alderley, the myth of the Sleeping Hero, as taught to me by my grandfather, who knew, though he could not have put it into these words, that it was our inheritance and truth.
